“This is an extraordinary book! The Mindfulness Edge will help you take advantage of your greatest strategic asset: your mind. This book offers a practical path to mastering your mind—and changing your brain in ways essential for effective leadership—with one simple habit. Develop this habit and you will not only be more successful both professionally and personally, you'll be more fulfilled as well.”
—Skip Prichard, president and CEO, Online Computer Library Center, Inc.; Leadership Insights blogger at www.skipprichard.com
“I thoroughly enjoyed this valuable book. Matt Tenney and Tim Gard show quite clearly how mindfulness can transform everyday activities into opportunities to change our brains in ways that improve essential leadership skills. They also offer a practical, enjoyable path to consistently being the leaders we aspire to be.”
—Bob Hottman, CEO, EKS&H
“This is a game-changing book. Based on cutting-edge research and illuminated by real-world examples and practical guidance, The Mindfulness Edge can take your business acumen, leadership skills, and personal growth to a higher level. I have read roughly 2,000 business books and this one is now in my top 10.”
—John Spence, named one of the top 500 leadership development experts in the world by www.HR.com
“I found this book very insightful. It serves as a practical training manual for improving self-awareness, and shows how self-awareness impacts nearly every aspect of leadership. This book will not only help you to be a better leader, it will also help you to enjoy the journey.”
—Gregory A. Serrao, executive chairman, American Dental Partners, Inc.
“In The Mindfulness Edge, Matt Tenney and Tim Gard present—in an engaging and inspiring way—a practical method of ‘strength training’ for the most important ‘muscle’ in your body: your brain. This insightful book is a game plan on how to apply mindfulness training to create the self-awareness and mental agility needed for impactful leadership. This is a must-read for any leader looking to raise the bar of excellence, while also becoming happier!”
—Chris Thoen, senior vice president, head of Global Science and Technology, Givaudan Flavours Corp.
“I truly enjoyed this book! The applications and narrative herein apply not only to leadership but also to life. With readable and to-the-point information on mindfulness backed by rigorous neuroscience, I strongly recommend The Mindfulness Edge to people new to the practice and to people with a long-standing interest.”
—Tara Swart, MD, PhD, CEO, The Unlimited Mind; senior lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management; and coauthor of Neuroscience for Leadership: Harnessing the Brain Gain Advantage
“I recommend The Mindfulness Edge to leaders of all types. The book offers a path to self-mastery through mindfulness training and guidance for applying that self-mastery to enhance the effectiveness of your employees and company, thereby more positively impacting your clients. The authors explain the practice in great detail, inviting reflection along the way, and show how mindfulness can be easily integrated into daily routines with a measurable impact on your home, social, and business worlds.”
—Rick Staab, CEO, InterMed
“If you want one book that dives deeply and eloquently into one of the single best ingredients for a healthy and effective brain, The Mindfulness Edge is it. Matt Tenney and Tim Gard pair up to give spot-on insights that will unleash some awesome things already hanging out in your head. Bathe your brain in this book and get ready to find a whole new you.”
—Scott G. Halford, executive educator, National Hall of Fame speaker, and author of Activate Your Brain: How Understanding Your Brain Can Improve Your Work—and Your Life
“The brilliance of The Mindfulness Edge is that it deviates so significantly from the status quo. Rather than merely add to the cacophonous volume of information and advice that overcrowds our mental faculties, this book offers practical, achievable guidance on how to skillfully embrace the chaos and complexity of today's business environment so that we can uncover truly innovative solutions on our own.”
—Martin Sirk, CEO, International Congress and Convention Association
“As the business and investment worlds tentatively shift their focus away from short-term transactions toward longer-term relationships, we need excellent leaders to strengthen this trend: leaders with the skills to align our corporations and institutions with the needs of society, the economy, and the environment. The Mindfulness Edge is a timely and practical guide for those aspiring to this task.”
—Colin Melvin, CEO, Hermes Equity Ownership Services, Ltd.
“The Mindfulness Edge brilliantly and scientifically demonstrates why mindfulness is a key ingredient in leadership. This book offers not only insight into the journey of mindfulness, but the road map, the compass, and the tour guide to get you there.”
—Chad Paris, CEO, Parisleaf
“I thoroughly enjoyed this very entertaining and highly useful read. This inspiring book brings together the sound and thorough interpretation of up-to-date neuroscience research with fun-to-read stories and suggestions for applying mindfulness practice in daily life.”
—Britta Hölzel, PhD, neuroscientist, mindfulness trainer, and author
“The Mindfulness Edge offers a fresh and highly practical approach to mastering mindfulness and creating inspiring, mindful workplaces.”
—Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader: Ten Principles for Bringing Out the Best in Ourselves and Others
“Matt Tenney and Tim Gard haven written the first really practical, neuroscience-based guide for enhancing leadership performance through mindfulness. You can start rewiring your brain now!”
—Wibo Koole, director, Centrum voor Mindfulness, Amsterdam, and best-selling author of Mindful Leadership: Effective Tools to Help You Focus and Succeed
Cover design: Wiley
Copyright © 2016 by Matt Tenney and Tim Gard. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Tenney, Matt, author.
Title: The mindfulness edge : how to rewire your brain for leadership and personal excellence without adding to your schedule / Matt Tenney.
Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2016. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041523 (print) | LCCN 2016001068 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119183181 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119183204 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119183242 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Mindfulness (Psychology) | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Leadership.
Classification: LCC HD57.7 .T4578 2016 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092019–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041523
To my parents, Molly and Gary, for your unconditional support.
—Matt Tenney
To Marasha, Max, and Lex.
—Tim Gard
Please don't be intimidated by the subtitle of this book, or by the fact that the coauthor is a super genius neuroscientist who has worked at leading research institutions, including Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. The main text, which is in my voice, will not delve deeply into neuroscience and is a fairly easy and highly practical read.
Although I'll mention quite a bit of research and shed some light on the latest understanding of how we can rewire our brains for leadership excellence, the more in-depth discussions of neuroscience research, and other interesting studies, are set aside from the main text in sections called “Neuro Notes.” If you'd like to go a bit deeper with the neuroscience for your own education, or so you can sound cool at dinner parties, or just to add to the enjoyment of the book, I encourage you to read the Neuro Notes. If you don't think the extra scientific depth is necessary, you can skip the Neuro Notes and stick with the main text without fear of losing the main thrust of the book.
The Neuro Notes are written by the aforementioned super genius neuroscientist, Tim Gard, PhD. In addition to writing the Neuro Notes, Dr. Gard has been instrumental in finding the most recent, relevant research for this book. He also worked with me on the main text to help improve it in many ways, including ensuring that I didn't overstate the results of the research we cite in this book.
Dr. Gard has helped improve this book significantly. I believe that, thanks to him, you will enjoy the book significantly more than if I had written it alone and that you'll walk away with a much greater understanding of your brain and your power to change it in ways that can help you achieve both leadership and personal excellence.
Think of all the simple activities that you already engage in every day—activities such as brushing your teeth, getting dressed, commuting to work, walking to your desk, waiting for the coffee to brew, waiting for your computer to boot up, and so on. These activities are often labeled as “downtime” or “wastes of time.”
Now, imagine that you could transform those activities into some of the most productive moments of the day, while also increasing your happiness. Cutting-edge research in neuroscience suggests that you can actually do just that.
This book is about a simple tool that can help you:
I know it may sound too good to be true, but the tool we'll discuss in this book can help you do all of the above. In fact, it gets even better.
This tool is absolutely free, and it doesn't require you to add anything to your schedule, which is likely quite full already. All you need to do is change the way you do things you're already doing every day. It takes about as much effort as taking a pill, but you can apply this tool every waking moment of your life. And, when practiced correctly, the side effects include only positive things, such as increased happiness and improved health.
The tool to which I'm referring is a simple practice known as mindfulness training.1
Over the last couple of years, during workshops and training programs I've offered, I've asked thousands of people the following question: “Would you agree with me when I say that all success and all failure originate in the mind?”
No one has ever disagreed. The question is essentially rhetorical. We know that everything we do, or fail to do, begins in the mind.
The reason I ask the question above is because it makes the next question much more powerful: “How many people do you know who take time every day to intentionally train the mind to function more effectively?”
Typically, in business audiences, only 1 to 3 percent of the people raise their hands.
I find this quite interesting. Everyone seems to agree that an effectively functioning mind is the root of all personal and professional success, yet very few people take time each day to intentionally train their minds. We might add knowledge through study, but we don't do anything to train how the mind actually functions. In most cases, this is because people are not aware that a systematic process of training the mind exists, a method of training that is being applied at highly successful companies, such as Google, Apple, Aetna, Intel, General Mills, and many others.
For most of us, unfortunately, the result of not training the mind is that it can be our greatest obstacle to success. It is often a source of anxiety, self-doubt, and repetitive thought patterns that limit us, keeping us from reaching our full potential.
This book offers several radical paradigm shifts. The first broad shift is that we all have the ability to train our minds in such a way that reverses the situation described above. We can transform the mind so that it is no longer our greatest obstacle to success but, rather, an incredibly powerful tool that allows us to achieve significantly greater success in both our personal and our professional lives, especially as leaders.
It would have been nearly impossible 20 years ago to find a neuroscientist who believed that the physical structure of the human brain could be changed after adolescence. Today, this view is quite different. In 2004, for instance, a neuroscientist named Bogdan Draganski and his colleagues showed that people who have trained in juggling for three months develop measurably more gray matter2—the switchboard substance of the brain, so to speak—in brain regions that are associated with the processing and storage of complex visual motion.3,4
There is now a whole new focus of neuroscience growing around the fact that the brain can be changed, which is referred to as neuroplasticity. One of the most promising discoveries in the realm of neuroplasticity is that we can change our brains throughout our entire lives. An old dog really can learn new tricks!
The aspect of neuroplasticity that I find most exciting is the more recent discovery that we can actually change the physical structure of the brain simply by using the mind.7 One of the first studies to shed light on the possibility of changing the brain simply by using the mind involved taxi drivers in London, England. As part of their exams for obtaining a license to drive a cab in London, they must acquire what is known as “the Knowledge.” They are required to memorize routes in an area that includes roughly 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest. Acquiring “the Knowledge” can take two to four years of training.
In 2011, when Woollett and Maguire, neuroscientists at University College London, studied the brains of a group of London cab drivers before and after acquiring “the Knowledge,” they discovered a significant increase in gray matter in the area of the brain associated with spatial memory (the posterior hippocampi). No such changes have been found in those trainees who failed to qualify as licensed London taxi drivers and a control group who did not go through the training.8
As the practice of mindfulness has become more widespread, the scientific community has become increasingly interested in mindfulness training, and a tremendous amount of research has been compiled on the benefits of the practice.9 There are now numerous studies that strongly suggest that mindfulness training results in physical changes to the structure of the brain—in some cases as quickly as eight weeks—that can be linked to better leadership skills.10 In this book we'll explore how, with mindfulness training, we can literally rewire our brains for leadership excellence.11
This book is based on a combination of previously separate training programs that I have offered to leaders. I understand that oftentimes the most pressing issue in an organization is the financial situation. There can be tremendous pressure to “hit the numbers” every single quarter.
Thus, we start by discussing how mindfulness training can help leaders make decisions that have better impacts on gross margins and expenses. This helps us make quick, direct impacts on the bottom line, which means we're more likely to keep our jobs long enough to make a long-term impact. Better business acumen also allows a leader to have more resources available to serve both the customer and the members of the organization.
However, as I explored in great detail in my first book, Serve to Be Great, if leaders place too much emphasis on the numbers and fail to serve and care for the people on their teams effectively, the organization will eventually fail. Without happy, loyal team members, it is nearly impossible to keep happy, loyal customers. Without happy, loyal customers, an organization simply can't exist for long. Therefore, we also need to address the leadership skills that allow us to create and sustain a culture that drives the long-term growth and profitability of our organizations.
Fortunately, there is a bridge between better business acumen and better leadership skills. The bridge is the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness training helps us develop the self-awareness and mental agility that are the keys to better business acumen and the foundation for developing the emotional and social intelligence that allow us to serve and care for the people on our teams more effectively, and thus create sustainable, high-performance team cultures.
The book is divided into two parts to make it easy to approach the topics we'll discuss:
We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it!